“No?”
He shook his head and pried his wrist from my grip—not to pull away, but to lace our fingers together in a fleeting squeeze. “I don’t regret it. I just wish it had happened somewhere else.”
Because he was scared of intimacy in his bed—in the place where he slept. The place where most people, mostchildren, felt safest of all.
More bile surged up my throat. Black rage boiled my blood and he felt it. I know he did.
“Mateo.”
“What?”
“I need you to trust me.”
“With what?”
“Anything. Everything. It fucks me up that I’ve put so much on you.”
“You had to put it on me. Because I let this—” I gestured between us—“get out of control when you’d always warned me it would fuck everything up.”
“Nice try. ButIkissedyou.How was that your fault?”
“You were off your nut. I knew that and I let it happen.”
Embry sat back, perhaps forgetting that he was pretty much on my lap. Lucky for both of us, I was an expert at keeping my dick under control around him. But the heat of him still ricocheted around my body, blasting into caverns of my heart and soul I hadn’t known existed before him.
He shifted a little—fucking hell—and I curled my hands into fists. Had to, or I’d seize his hips and haul him into me. Kiss him and do all the things I’d never dreamt of until I’d met him.
Don’t say it.The warning came too late, the stupid question already formed. “What did you want to do with me when you first brought me up here?”
Embry rolled his eyes. “Lots of things.”
“Like what?”
“You’re gonna make me say this shit out loud?”
I’d never make him do anything. He knew that, or we wouldn’t be here. But if there was a possibility his mind had gone to the same hot and heady places mine had, I wanted to know about it.
So I waited him out, patient in ways that were still a mystery to me.
Embry rubbed the back of his neck. Then seemed to remember he was sitting on me. “I don’t make this easy, do I?”
“You told me once that nothing easy was ever worth much.”
“So you do listen.”
Course I did. Hyper-focusing on every word that came out of his mouth was how I stayed sane. At least it used to be, before he got hurt. He didn’t talk as much these days. He smoked more weed and stared into space a lot. PTSD? Maybe. Cam had it. The whole council knew. Orla and River too. But Embry was better at hiding his shit. No one saw what I saw, and it scared me to hell and back that all he had in the world was me.
You can’t fuck this up.
Still, I took my life in my hands and reached for him. On my gravestone it was gonna say,sometimes he was stupid.
My hands landed on Embry’s hips, not claiming or tugging, just sitting there, palms to the sweatpants he’d rolled out of bed in. “If I share a secret, will you tell me what you wanted to do with me up here?”
Embry stared at my hands on him as if it was the first time I’d ever touched him.
It wasn’t. Far from it. But it was the first time I’d put hands on him up here. “Is it your secret? Or are we gossiping?”
I brushed my thumbs up and down just once. “It’s mine, Em. And it’s a big one.”
